“We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you,” Zuckerberg said, in his first public comments on the harvesting of Facebook user data by a British firm linked to Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.

Writing on his Facebook page, Zuckerberg announced new steps to rein in the leakage of data to outside developers and third-party apps, while giving users more control over their information through a special toolbar.

Zuckerberg said measures had been in place since 2014 to prevent precisely the sort of abuse revealed at the weekend.

“But we also made mistakes, there’s more to do, and we need to step up and do it,” he said.

The scandal erupted when a whistleblower revealed that British data consultant Cambridge Analytica (CA) had created psychological profiles on 50 million Facebook users via a personality prediction app, created by a researcher named Aleksandr Kogan.

The app was downloaded by 270,000 people, but also scooped up their friends’ data without consent — as was possible under Facebook’s rules at the time.

Facebook says it discovered last week that CA may not have deleted the data as it certified.

“This was a breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook,” Zuckerberg wrote. “But it was also a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it.”

“We need to fix that.”

– Probe by special counsel? –

Zuckerberg’s admission follows another day of damaging accusations against the world’s biggest social network as calls mounted for investigations on both sides of the Atlantic.

Max Schrems, a Vienna-Based activist who has brought online data protection cases before European courts, told AFP he complained to the Irish Data Protection Authority in 2011 about the controversial data harvesting methods.

Schrems also recounted a seven-hour meeting with Facebook representatives the following year to discuss concerns around apps operating in this fashion, but said they said they saw no problems with their policies.

“They explicitly said that in their view, by using the platform you consent to a situation where other people can install an app and gather your data,” Schrems said.

ABC News reported meanwhile special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 campaign, was looking at Cambridge Analytica’s role in the Trump effort.

Citing anonymous sources, ABC said several digital experts who worked on Trump’s campaign have held closed-door interviews with Mueller’s team.

The British firm has maintained it did not use Facebook data in the Trump campaign, but its now-suspended CEO boasted in secret recordings that his company was deeply involved in the race.

– #DeleteFacebook –

The data scandal has ratcheted up the pressure on Facebook — already under fire for allowing fake news to proliferate on its platform during the US presidential election.

A movement to quit the social network gathered momentum, while a handful of lawsuits emerged which could turn into class actions — in a costly distraction for the company.

One of those calling it quits was a high-profile co-founder of the WhatsApp messaging service acquired by Facebook in 2014.

“It is time. #deletefacebook,” Brian Acton said in a tweet protesting the social media giant’s handling of the crisis.

Both Facebook and CA have denied wrongdoing, as attention focused increasingly on Kogan, the inventor of the controversial app — personality survey dubbed This Is Your Digital Life.

But Kogan said in an interview he was “stunned” by the allegations against him, claiming CA had assured him his activities were above board.

“I’m being basically used as a scapegoat by both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica,” he told the BBC. “We thought we were acting perfectly appropriately. ”

The University of Cambridge psychologist said CA had approached him to do the work, and that he did not know how the firm would use the data collected with his app.

European Union officials have called for an urgent investigation while British, US and EU lawmakers have asked Zuckerberg to give evidence.

Responding to Zuckerberg’s comments Wednesday, US Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts was the latest lawmaker to call on Zuckerberg to appear.

“You need to come to Congress and testify to this under oath,” Markey tweeted.

British Prime Minister Theresa May has urged Facebook and CA to cooperate with the national information commissioner’s probe.

“The allegations are clearly very concerning,” she told MPs.

“People need to have confidence in how their personal data is being used.”

Facebook shares steadied Wednesday, gaining 0.74 percent after steep declines this week that wiped out some $50 billion in market value.

But questions abounded on the future of Facebook, which has grown from a startup in a Harvard dorm room to become one of the world’s most powerful companies.

Analyst Brian Wieser at Pivotal Research said Facebook “is exhibiting signs of systemic mismanagement,” possibly from growing too fast.

“Investors now have to consider whether or not the company will conclude that it has grown in a manner that has proven to be untenable,” Wieser said in a research note.

They agreed the time was right and the technology was readily available for this to happen, in the same way that US President Donald Trump’s campaign team benefited from a large cache of personal details collected from some 50 million Facebook users.

The data was used for psychological profiling of American voters and a powerful database helped carry Trump to victory in the 2016 presidential election.

This has become an issue after Facebook expressed outrage over the “misuse” of its data by Cambridge Analytica, the British company at the centre of a major scandal rocking the social media giant.

The UK firm suspended its chief executive, Alexander Nix, after recordings emerged in which he boasted that his data company played an expansive role in Trump’s election campaign, doing all of its research and analytics as well as digital and television campaigns, Agence France-Presse reported yesterday.

In undercover filming captured by Britain’s Channel 4 News, the suspended CEO is also seen boasting about entrapping politicians and secretly operating in elections around the world through shadowy front companies.

According to http://www.statista.com, as of January 2018, Thailand has the eighth highest number of Facebook users in the world, with 51 million people using the social network.

Bhume Bhumiratana, a researcher and educator in cyber-security, said yesterday that it was highly likely that the next general election in Thailand would see the use of big data analytics in profiling voters.

He said that profiling of social media users was nothing new in Thailand, although it was usually done for marketing purposes.

People involved in consumer profiling may partner with some politicians or political parties in order to determine their targeted voters, in an attempt to win more votes in their election campaigning, he said.

“Technologically speaking, it’s possible to use information about people’s preferences in election campaigning,” he said.

He also warned Facebook users that their personal information was already being collected by various apps that seek their permission for access to their data.

“There is a high likelihood these apps will use our personal data in a wrong way. Many advertisements target us and we don’t know the real intention,” he said.

Arthit Suriyawongkul, coordinator of Thai Netizen Network, a leading non-profit campaign that advocates digital rights and liberties, said yesterday that there are many apps that collect personal data and personal details of social media users, particularly on Facebook.

The most popular among those apps is VonVon, which is well known among Thai social media users, he said, noting that the app uses the same application programming interface (API) as the one used by Cambridge Analytica.

Arthit said such profiling could be done easily here, as Thailand still has no law that protects personal data in general.

However, he saw nothing wrong with political parties campaigning about what their prospective voters want to hear, unless the database is misused or illegally obtained. “There should be no problem if the parties can keep their promises,” he added.

He said he was more concerned that this issue could be used by the Election Commission or the National Broadcast and Telecommunications Commission as a reason for tighter control of social media.

Poomjit Sirawongprasert, president of the Thai Hosting Club, said that voter profiling with the goal of winning an election could be done in Thailand as long as the people involved have the knowledge, money and time.

Here is a timeline of the story so far.

MARCH 16

Social media giant Facebook knew ahead of time that on Saturday, the New York Times and The Guardian’s Observer would issue bombshell reports to expose a data leak concerning tens of millions of its users.

In a bid to protect itself, Facebook proceeded to send letters to the media firms laying out its legal case for why this data leak did not constitute a “breach”, and in a blog post, it scooped the reports using their information, saying why it was suspending Cambridge Analytica from its site.

MARCH 17

The two newspapers broke reports on how Cambridge Analytica played a role in harvesting and misusing private and personal information from more than 50 million Facebook users, adding that the data breach was one of the largest in the history of Facebook. They quoted whistleblower Christopher Wylie, who helped set up the firm and worked with an academic Aleksandr Kogan at Cambridge University to obtain the data, as saying the system could profile individual voters to target them with personalised political ads.

MARCH 18

US and British lawmakers demanded that Facebook explain how the firm was able to harvest personal information without the social network’s alerting users. US senators also called on Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg to testify before Congress. Attorneys-general from the US states of Massachusetts and Connecticut launch investigations into how the Facebook data was handled, and the UK Information Commissioner’s Office is also pursuing a warrant to search Cambridge Analytica’s office in London.

MARCH 19

Britain’s Channel 4 News reports that, based on secretly recorded video, Cambridge Analytica secretly stage-managed Kenya President Uhuru Kenyatta’s campaigns in the hotly contested 2013 and 2017 elections. The firm proceeded to deny the report. Facebook’s chief of security Alex Stamos announced that his role has shifted to focusing on emerging risks and election security at the global social network after the New York Times reported he was leaving Facebook in the wake of internal clashes over how to deal with Russian actors using the platform to spread false or exaggerated stories to cause division among US voters.

MARCH 20

The BBC reported that the head of the European Parliament said it would investigate to see if the data was misused, and a spokesman for British Prime Minister Theresa May said she was “very concerned” about the revelations.

Cambridge Analytica suspends its chief executive Alexander Nix after broadcaster Channel 4 aired a second undercover video in which he claims the firm’s online campaign played a decisive role in Trump’s 2016 election victory.

Malaysia’s ruling coalition Barisan Nasional (BN) becomes embroiled in the scandal as the opposition questioned Prime Minister Najib Razak’s role in using the big data firm to score wins in the country’s 2013 polls. But the administration has denied employing the firm, and said any services were provided personally to former BN leader turned opposition politician Mukhriz Mahathir. Shareholders sued Facebook in San Francisco federal court in a class action, saying that they suffered losses after the data privacy violations disclosure.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) opens an investigation into whether Facebook violated an 2011 consent decree with the agency on data privacy. A lawyer for Christopher Wylie confirms that he plans to accept an invitation from the US House Intelligence Committee Democrats to give an interview, as part of their effort to continue to investigate Russian interference in the election, including possible ties to the Trump campaign. Facebook take steps to prevent what it calls fake news during Mexico’s presidential campaign.

It placed full-page ads in prominent Mexican newspapers, including El Financiero, under the title “Tips To Detect Fake News”. Cambridge University psychology academic Aleksandr Kogan appears in a CNN interview and says he had been made a scapegoat by Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, and that the accuracy of the dataset had been exaggerated and was more likely to hurt Trump’s campaign.

MARCH 21

Fears of increased regulation over social media firms triggered market sell-off of technology stocks like Facebook, Snap and Twitter. Facebook’s shares tumbled more than 9 per cent in the past week, losing US$60 billion (S$79 billion) of its stock market value since the scandal broke.

SOURCES: REUTERS, BLOOMBERG, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, NYTIMES, BBC

“It’s time”, Acton wrote in a tweet on Tuesday, which included the hashtag #DeleteFacebook.

Acton’s remark comes in the wake of increasing public outrage from users around the world over the misuse of private data of as many as 50 million Facebook users by British firm Cambridge Analytica.

The news which broke over the weekend has now grown into a full blown crisis with lawmakers in the US, UK and Europe demanding answers from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. On Tuesday, the BBC reported that Zuckerberg, who at the time of writing was yet to officially comment on the scandal, has not even addressed Facebook staff since the news broke, with employees at its headquarters in California being spoken to by one of the company’s senior lawyers on Monday.

Investigations in the UK and US are now underway into Cambridge Analytica, which has claimed it helped Donald Trump win the White House. Cambridge Analytica accessed the private data of 50 million Facebook users without their permission.

They did this by creating a quiz that was taken by 270,000 Facebook users. The people who created the quiz passed the data to Cambridge Analytica, which is in breach of Facebook’s policy.

Facebook said it knew about the leak since 2015, but the incident only became public last weekend after reports by the New York Times and Guardian. Meanwhile, in the wake of the scandal, Cambridge Analytica confirmed it has suspend its CEO, Alexander Nix.

Aleksandr Kogan said that British firm Cambridge Analytica, which is at the centre of a major scandal rocking Facebook, assured him that what he was doing was “perfectly legal and within the terms of service” of the social media giant.

A former CA employee says the company was able to create psychological profiles on 50 million Facebook users through the use of a personality prediction app that was downloaded by 270,000 people. It did so by scooping up data from the users’ friends on the social network — as was possible under Facebook’s rules at the time.

CA has blamed Kogan, the University of Cambridge psychologist who developed the personality survey called This Is Your Digital Life, for misusing the data. Kogan told the BBC he was “stunned” by the allegations against him.

“The events of the past week have been a total shell shock. My view is that I’m being basically used as a scapegoat by both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica,” he said. “Honestly, we thought we were acting perfectly appropriately. We thought we were doing something that was really normal.” He added:

“We were assured by Cambridge Analytica that everything was perfectly legal and within the terms of service.” CA’s chief executive Alexander Nix — suspended on Tuesday — was recorded boasting that the firm played an expansive role in US President Donald Trump’s 2016 election bid, doing all of its research, analytics as well as digital and television campaigns.

CA has denied using Facebook data for the Trump campaign and said it had in any case been deleted. Facebook says the data was taken without its knowledge and has launched its own investigation into CA.

    This one, an app called “thisismydigitallife”, was a personality quiz, asking questions about how outgoing a person is, how vengeful one can be, whether one finishes projects, worries a lot, likes art, or is talkative.

About 320,000 people took the quiz, designed by a man named Alexsandr Kogan.

Kogan was contracted to do it by a company called Cambridge Analytica, founded by US Republican supporters including Steve Bannon, who would become the strategist for Donald Trump.

Because Kogan’s app was circulated via Facebook, it reaped far more than just the information on those who took the test. At the time, in 2015, such apps could scrape up all the personal details of not only the quiz-taker, but all their Facebook friends.

That ultimately became a horde of data on some 50 million Facebook users — their personal information, their likes, their places, their pictures, and their networks.

Marketers use such information to pitch cars, clothes, and vacations with targeted ads. It was used in earlier elections by candidates to identify potential supporters.

But for Kogan and Cambridge it was a much bigger goldmine. They used it for psychological profiling of US voters, creating a powerful database that helped carry Trump to victory in the 2016 presidential election.

The data let the Trump campaign know more than perhaps anyone has ever known about Facebook users, creating targeted ads and messaging that could play on their individual biases, fears and loves — effectively creating a bond between them and the candidate.

– Psychometric profiling –

The project was based on the work of a former Cambridge scientist, Michal Kosinski, who studies people based on what information they generate on line.

Kosinski and fellow researcher David Stillwell had for several years tapped into Facebook for psychometric profiling using their own personality test app, “myPersonality”.

The app accumulated six million test results, along with users’ Facebook profiles, and their friends’ profiles, in a powerful research database.

In 2015 they published a study carrying the bold title: “Computer-based personality Judgments are more accurate than those made by humans.”

They showed, for example, that they could divine a fairly accurate psychometric portrait of a person using only their Facebook “likes”.

“Computers outpacing humans in personality Judgment presents significant opportunities and challenges in the areas of psychological assessment, marketing, and privacy,” they wrote.

Kosinski would not share the database with Kogan and Cambridge Analytica, reportedly knowing it would be used for a political campaign.

But Kogan created his own app quiz and, through that, amassed the database on 50 million people that would be the backbone of Trump’s social media campaign.

Facebook now says Kogan did that illegally. And it has since also restricted apps from such broad data collection on friend networks.

– Powerful results —

But Cambridge Analytica proved that Kosinski’s methods were powerful.

They started with the standard psychological profiling test known as Big Five or OCEAN, which measures five traits: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

The test-taker answers a list of statements like “I am someone who tends to be organized” or “who rarely feels excited” or “has few artistic interests,” using a scale from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree”.

Those basic results were combined with the data raked from Facebook profiles and friend networks, associating longer lists of traits.

For example, to categorize voters, an algorithm could find links between “agreeableness” or “neuroticism” and gender, age, religion, hobbies, travel, specific political views, and a host of other variables.

The data generated an incredible 4,000 or more data points on each US voter, according to Alexander Nix, Cambridge Analytica’s chief executive before he was suspended on Tuesday.

The power of psychographic data, experts say, is not in the granularity itself, but in combining data to make significant correlations about people — something with requires powerful computer algorithms.

Ultimately, it allowed the campaign to know far more about voters than anyone ever has before.

The output was put to work in what Nix called “behavioral microtargeting” and “psychographic messaging”.

More simply said, the campaign could put out messages, news and images via Facebook and other social media that was finely targeted to press the right buttons on an individual that would push them into Trump’s voter base.

For Trump, it worked.

“If you know the personality of the people you’re targeting, you can nuance your messaging to resonate more effectively with those key audience groups,” Nix said in a 2016 presentation.//AFP

Scientists from Britain and Thailand, where the native long-tailed macaque (Macaca fascicularis) feeds on sea almonds, oil palm nuts and the occasional bivalve, observed the monkeys using stones for two distinct tasks.

Larger rocks, some weighing up to two kilogrammes (4.5 pounds), were used as a hammer to smash open nuts, while sharper stones formed knife-like levers to jimmy open prey such as oysters.

Before the study, conducted on Thailand’s Piak Nam Yai island, it was thought that only chimpanzees and bearded capuchins used stones to break open food in the wild.

Professor Tomos Proffitt, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at University College London, who wrote the study, said it could have wide relevance to primate studies.

“It contributes to our increasing understanding that not only apes and humans use tools for different tasks,” he told AFP.

“We should view macaques as highly intelligent problem solvers, in the same way that chimpanzees, capuchin monkeys are and early humans were also.”

Scientists in Brazil in 2016 observed wild-bearded capuchin monkeys hammering away at stones to create rough flakes similar to the tools first used by human forerunners.

But one of the macaques’ food sources, the oil palm, was only introduced to their island in the past few decades, meaning that the monkeys have learned to use tools to access its fruit for food extremely quickly, evolutionarily speaking.

“What we see is that they are adapting this stone tool use to other food sources away from the coast,” Proffitt said.

“In many cases of primate tool use these behaviours are learnt by youngsters through many years of observation and is not something that is genetically coded into them.”

The study was published in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

Twitter shares closed down 10.4 percent at $31.735 following comments by Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, who criticized Twitter for not doing enough to counter messages that incite violence against Israel.

Shaked warned that the Israeli government was considering “legal action” against Twitter.

“Terrorist organizations have been running from Twitter instead of Facebook. Simple reason: Facebook responds effectively to our inquiries in the removal of terrorist content. Twitter ignores,” she tweeted.

“We are considering running legal measures against them,” she wrote in comments translated from Hebrew.

Twitter’s tumble came as social media stocks overall were under pressure following widespread criticism of Facebook over reports that a data analysis firm hired by Donald Trump’s presidential campaign misused the data of some 50 million users.

Facebook shares fell 2.6 percent following reports the Federal Trade Commission was investigating the company over the episode and whether it violated a 2011 consent decree over the handling of consumer data.

Shares of Facebook had already lost 6.8 percent on Monday.

“Facebook is unregulated and very profitable but concerns over future regulation are now at a fever pitch. Regulation would likely increase costs,” Briefing.com said in a note.

“Another risk is the increased potential for users to shun the company’s flagship social network.”

Two other social media companies also fell, with Snap losing 2.6 percent and Pandora Media giving up 1.9 percent.

The move to suspend CEO Alexander Nix came as recordings emerged in which he boasts his data company played an expansive role in Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, doing all of its research, analytics as well as digital and television campaigns.

In undercover filming captured by Britain’s Channel 4 News, he is also seen boasting about entrapping politicians and secretly operating in elections around the world through shadowy front companies.

Lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic have demanded answers after it was revealed at the weekend that Cambridge Analytica improperly harvested information from 50 million Facebook users.

Cambridge Analytica has denied using Facebook data for the Trump campaign, but the scandal has ratcheted up the pressure on the social media giant — already under fire for allowing fake news to proliferate on its platform during the US campaign.

On Tuesday Facebook said its top executives were “working around the clock to get all the facts.”

“The entire company is outraged we were deceived. We are committed to vigorously enforcing our policies to protect people’s information and will take whatever steps are required to see that this happens,” the firm said.

Cambridge Analytica’s board said meanwhile that Nix would stand aside immediately pending an investigation into the snowballing allegations against him.

“In the view of the Board, Mr. Nix’s recent comments secretly recorded by Channel 4 and other allegations do not represent the values or operations of the firm and his suspension reflects the seriousness with which we view this violation,” the company said.

In Channel 4’s recordings, Nix slights US representatives on the House Intelligence Committee to whom he gave evidence last year, claiming its Democrats are motivated by “sour grapes” and Republicans asked few questions.

“They’re politicians, they’re not technical. They don’t understand how it works,” he was caught on camera telling an undercover reporter.

He also outlines the use of a secret self-destructing email system.

“There’s no evidence, there’s no paper trail, there’s nothing,” he said of the tool, which deletes emails two hours after they have been read.

Investigations multiply

Channel 4 News broadcast an interview filmed in October last year with defeated presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, in which she said she had faced “a massive propaganda effort”.

“There was a new kind of campaign that was being run on the other side,” she said. “It affected the thought processes of voters.”

Facebook now faces investigations on both sides of the Atlantic, sending its share price tumbling another 2.6 percent after a 6.8 percent plunge Monday.

European Union officials have called for an urgent investigation while British lawmakers have asked Zuckerberg to give evidence to a UK parliamentary committee.

Zuckerberg has been asked to appear before the European Parliament.

“Facebook needs to clarify before the representatives of 500 million Europeans that personal data is not being used to manipulate democracy,” tweeted parliament president Antonio Tajani.

US lawmakers have also called on Zuckerberg to appear before Congress, along with the chief executives of Twitter and Google.

Officials in the US states of Massachusetts and New York announced they were sending a “demand letter” to Facebook for the facts of the case.

“Consumers have a right to know how their information is used — and companies like Facebook have a fundamental responsibility to protect their users’ personal information,” New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman said in a statement.

Thirteen US consumer and privacy organizations meanwhile released a letter to the Federal Trade Commission asking it to reopen a probe into Facebook, saying the firm’s admission so far “suggests a clear violation” of a 2011 consent decree.

Watchdog searches

A former Cambridge Analytica employee says it was able to create psychological profiles on 50 million Facebook users through the use of a personality prediction app that was downloaded by 270,000 people, but also scooped up data from friends — as was possible under Facebook’s rules at the time.

The end goal was to create software to predict and influence voters’ choices at the ballot box.

The company blames the academic who developed the app, University of Cambridge psychologist Aleksandr Kogan, for misusing the data, which it says was never used on the Trump campaign, and has in any event been deleted.

But the firm’s reputation took a severe hit on Monday, with the broadcast of a first batch of secret footage showing Nix saying it could entrap politicians in compromising situations with bribes and sex workers.

He also said the firm secretly campaigns in elections around the world, including by operating through a web of shadowy front companies, or by using sub-contractors, according to Channel 4 News.

A Cambridge Analytica spokesman told the news programme it does not use “untrue material for any purpose”.

Facebook, which says the data was taken without its knowledge, has launched its own investigation into Cambridge Analytica.

But it was forced to suspend its probe following a request from Britain’s information commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, who is making her own inquiries into both companies.

Denham’s office said it had yet to obtain a court warrant to search Cambridge Analytica’s servers, and was now expecting to secure it on Wednesday.